Almost everyone at Amazon is very talented, and the culture that Amazon explicitly values is positively unique among other megacorporations. The company is pretty generous with stock grants, though they tend to have protracted vesting schedules (could hardly be more so).

Cons

What you've heard about pagers is true. Amazon is frugal to a fault, and most technical roles involve at least some portion of after-hours on-call operational support, no matter how talented you think you are. AWS is something of an exception; that org has more outsourced support teams to help with some of the more established service issues. Negotiate on the way in because, like many companies, annual compensation increases are modest at best. The company also has a very bad habit of buying the cheapest possible laptops for even its technical employees.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Avoiding attrition by valuing your contributors is important! Small things can matter a lot more than they cost. Even young people need work/life balance for long-term success, and people at any age need to sleep uninterrupted most of the time.